we would like to apologize to our users who have enabled "watching notifications" — as a result of an inconsistency in our code our servers started processing malformed activities and sending emails to unrelated users.

One of the ways we communicate with our users is email. There are situations we rely on emails being quickly and reliably received by our users. If emails are lost, users are often prevented from completing actions — like creating a new account, recovering a forgotten password or changing an email address. We also use emails to notify about activities related to watched pages or sites and send important information related to user accounts.

But sending tens of thousands emails each day is not an easy task. There are various factors we need to adjust to. We need to find a way to send emails that are not recognized as spam (so that they are not blocked or placed in a spam folder). We need to play nice with large email providers like Hotmail, GMail or Yahoo so that Wikidot is considered a credible origin of emails. Somewhere in between there is domain authentication, SPF records, email bounces etc. At the number of emails we are dealing with daily we need to do our best to minimize number of failures — which is an ongoing process of constant improvements.

Over the last few weeks there has been an enormous wave of protests against the ACTA pact (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) in Poland. ACTA itself is supposed to be an international agreement to establish laws and standards for intellectual property protection. Think of ACTA as an international successor of DMCA.

Although DMCA itself has been criticized since its introduction in 1998 and has been abused numerous times (see "notice and takedown" criticism), it just works. But nobody is really happy about it: copyright holders claim it is still to difficult to take down stolen (= published against the license) content, and internet users feel the law limits their freedom of speech. The only group that should be happy with DMCA are internet and service providers (ISPs), which are not a subject to copyright law enforcement — provided they do follow the DMCA regulations and procedures.

One of many protests against ACTA in Warsaw.

Now ACTA is supposed to expand DMCA mechanisms world-wide, but in a quite awkward and controversial way. How bad is ACTA? Let us just say that in March 2010 EU adopted a resolution containing numerous objections against ACTA at the time, regarding freedom rights, privacy issues, secrecy of negotiations while creating ACTA and other legal aspects. Some of them still hold.